Today, I was walking down Fifth Avenue, dribbling my soccer ball home, when all of a sudden a car honks at me. I see its window rolling down, so I peer into the car, and some guy yells out “Cameron! Is that you?”.
Immediately I realize it’s Steven, a young man I met in Nice less than three months ago, and ran into at Gare du Nord in Paris by chance the next week.
It’s a small world.
It reminded me of some other small world stories I’ve experienced.
My roommate Nathan introduced me to Ben A, one of his schoolmates. Ben A has a cousin who goes to University of Oregon. Nathan and I went to Whistler over Martin Luther King weekend, and we ended up randomly meeting a group of girls from the University of Oregon who we hung out with for the remainder of the trip, and one of them, it turned out, was Maddie – Ben A’s cousin.
It’s fantastic when these kinds of stories get a little more interesting. It did. In August, I was sipping a doppio espresso at Starbucks on Avenue de l’Opera in Paris, and was startled to hear a young lady’s voice blurt out “Cameron?!?”
I turned around, only to find Ben A’s cousin Maddie again, a world away from the snowy Canada where we’d met.
Que le monde est petit !
Upon telling another friend, Stephanie, about my small world experience in Whistler and Paris, she went ahead and trumped mine:
“My junior year of high school I had a class with a Belgian exchange student who was studying at Ballard High School for the year. She left and after that and I thought I’d never see her again. On my first day of class at the University of Granada in Spain, guess who sits down right next to me??? The Belgian exchange student herself.”
¡Qué casualidad!
In an trivial yet interesting twist, Stephanie’s long lost friend from elementary school, Asia, by chance ended up in the same study abroad program in Granada – even though they go to different universities back home. By chance, I know Asia through my old roommate Nathan, the same Nathan who introduced me to Ben A in the first place.